Thales Alenia Space has signed two contracts with the Italian Space Agency (ASI) to demonstrate the benefits of satellite navigation for environmental monitoring. These contracts involve the development of airborne test beds GREAT and GROOVE, aimed at proving that Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals combined with reflectometry and radio occultation techniques can play a tangible role in various sectors such as civil protection, meteorology, aviation, and agriculture.
Enhancing traditional geolocation systems, GREAT and GROOVE also have the potential to model natural disaster forecasts (tsunamis, cyclones, tornadoes), provide support for rescue operations, assess and monitor the impact of climate change, and complement current numerical weather prediction (NWP) models for real-time meteorological estimations.
Image of the Earth from Meteosat Third Generation first imaging satellite (MTG-I1). Image unveiled by EUMETSAT & ESA in May 2023 © EUMETSAT & © ESA
While GREAT will leverage GNSS signals reflected by the Earth's surface, GROOVE will use satellite navigation signals passing through the atmosphere to estimate pressure, temperature, and humidity parameters within the troposphere. GREAT will employ innovative techniques such as beamforming and artificial intelligence to collect and process ground data (biomass, humidity), marine data (marine altimetry, wind speed), as well as river data under different atmospheric conditions. These parameters will then be compared with existing climate data to calculate vegetation water content, land cover state, ground precipitation map, leaf area index, and vegetation index.
The GROOVE and GREAT projects will benefit from Thales Alenia Space's proven expertise in satellite navigation and developing solutions for climate prevention and safeguarding our planet. Thales Alenia Space is notably contributing to leverage Europe’s leadership in PNT (Position, Navigation, and Timing), system, satellite, ground and technologies. Thales Alenia Space is the European Leader for satellite navigation systems, primarily because of our major contribution to EGNOS and GALILEO Programs. Thales Alenia Space is prime contractor for GALILEO ground mission segment, for 6 out of 12 satellites in the 2nd Generation and lead system engineering activities.